Ann Beattie - Burning House

Spence tosses the ball. I jump, mitt high above my head, and catch it. Spence throws again. Catch. Again. A hard pitch that lets me know the palm of my hand will be numb when I take off the catcher’s mitt. Spence winds up. Pitches. As I’m leaning to get the ball, another ball sails by on my right. Spence has hidden a ball in his pocket all this time. Like his brother, he’s always trying to make me smile.

“It’s too hot to play ball,” he says. “I can’t spend the whole day trying to distract you because Wynn stalked off into the woods today.”

“Come on,” I say. “It was working.”

“Why don’t we all go to Virginia Beach next year instead of standing around down here smoldering? This isn’t any tribute to my brother. How did this get started?”

“We came to be with you because we thought it would be hard. You didn’t tell us about Pammy.”

“Isn’t that something? What that tells you is that you matter, and Wynn matters, and Nicholas mattered, but I don’t even think to mention the person who’s supposedly my lover.”

“She said she had been an addict.”

“She probably tried to tell you she wasn’t twenty-one, too, didn’t she?”

I sidestep a strawberry plant, notice one croquet post stuck in the field.

“It was a lie?” I say.

“No,” he says. “I never know when to let my jokes die.”

When Nicholas was alive, we’d celebrate his birthday with mint juleps and croquet games, stuffing ourselves with cake, going for midnight skinny-dips. Even if he were alive, I wonder if today would be anything like those birthdays of the past, or whether we’d have bogged down so hopelessly that even his childish enthusiasm would have had little effect. Wynn is sure that he’s having a crisis and that it’s not the real thing with his student because he also has a crush on Pammy. We are open about everything: he tells me about taking long walks and thinking about nothing but sex; Spence bakes the French bread too long, finds that he’s lightly tapping a rock, sits on the kitchen counter, puts his hands over his face, and cries. Pammy says that she does not feel close to any of us — that Virginia was just a place to come to cool out. She isn’t sure she wants to go on with medical school. I get depressed and think that if the birds could talk, they’d say that they didn’t enjoy flying. The mountains have disappeared in the summer haze.

Late at night, alone on the porch, toasting Nicholas with a glass of wine, I remember that when I was younger, I assumed he’d be our guide: he saw us through acid trips, planned our vacations, he was always there to excite us and to give us advice. He started a game that went on for years. He had us close our eyes after we’d stared at something and made us envision it again. We had to describe it with our eyes closed. Wynn and Spence could talk about the things and make them more vivid than they were in life. They remembered well. When I closed my eyes, I squinted until the thing was lost to me. It kept going backwards into darkness.

Tonight, Nicholas’s birthday, it is dark and late and I have been trying to pay him some sort of tribute by seeing something and closing my eyes and imagining it. Besides realizing that two glasses of wine can make me drunk, I have had this revelation: that you can look at something, close your eyes and see it again and still know nothing — like staring at the sky to figure out the distances between stars.

The drunk in the van that hit Nicholas thought that he had hit a deer.

Tonight, stars shine over the field with the intensity of flashlights. Every year, Spence calls the state police to report that on his property, people are jacklighting.

Barbara is in her chaise. Something is wrong with the pool — everything is wrong with the pool — so it has not been filled with water. The green-painted bottom is speckled with golden-rod and geranium petals. The neighbor’s cat sits licking a paw under the shade of the little mimosa tree planted in one of the raised boxes at one corner of the pool.

“Take a picture of that,” Barbara says, putting her hand on top of her husband Sven’s wrist. He is her fourth husband. They have been married for two years. She speaks to him exactly the way she spoke to her third husband. “Take a picture of a kitty licking its paw, Sven.”

“I don’t have my camera,” he says.

“You usually always have it with you,” she says. She lights an Indonesian cigarette — a kretek —waves out the match and drops it in a little green dish full of cherry pits. She turns to me and says, “If he’d had his camera last Friday, he could have photographed the car that hit the what-do-you-call-it — the concrete thing that goes down the middle of the highway. They were washing up the blood.”

Sven gets up. He slips into his white thongs and flaps down the flagstone walk to the kitchen. He goes in and closes the door.

“How is your job, Oliver?” Barbara asks. Oliver is Barbara’s son, but she hardly ever sees him,

“Air-conditioned,” Oliver says. “They’ve finally got the air-conditioning up to a decent level in the building this summer.

“How is your job?” Barbara says to me.

I look at her, at Oliver.

“What job are you thinking, of, Mother?” he says.

“Oh — painting wicker white, or something. Painting the walls yellow. If you’d had amniocentesis, you could paint them blue or pink.”

“We’re leaving up the wallpaper,” Oliver says. “Why would a thirty-year-old woman have amniocentesis?”

“I hate wicker,” I say. “Wicker is for Easter baskets.”

Barbara stretches. “Notice the way it goes?” she says. “I ask a simple question, he answers for you, as if you’re helpless now that you’re pregnant, and that gives you time to think and zing back some snappy reply.”

“I think you’re the Queen of Snappiness,” Oliver says to her.

“Like the Emperor of Ice Cream?” She puts down her Dutch detective novel. “I never did understand Wallace Stevens,” she says. “Do any of you?”

Sven has come back with his camera and is focusing. The cat has walked away, but he wasn’t focusing on the cat anyway; it’s a group shot: Barbara in her tiny white bikini, Oliver in cut-off jeans, with the white raggedy strings trailing down his tan legs, and me in my shorts and baggy embroidered top that my huge stomach bulges hard against.

“Smile,” Sven says. “Do I really have to say smile?”

• • •

This is the weekend of Barbara’s sixtieth birthday, and Oliver’s half brother Craig has also come for the occasion. He has given her an early present: a pink T-shirt that says “60.” Oliver and I brought Godivas and a hair comb with a silk lily glued to it. Sven will give her a card and some orchids, flown in from some unimaginably far-off place, and a check. She will express shock at the check and not show anyone the amount, though she will pass around his birthday card. At dinner, the orchids will be in a vase, and Sven will tell some anecdote about a shoot he once went on in some faraway country.

Craig has brought two women with him, unexpectedly. They are tall, blond, silent, and look like twins but are not. Their clothes are permeated with marijuana. When they were introduced, one was wearing a Sony Walkman and the other had a tortoiseshell hair ornament in the shape of a turtle.

Now it is getting dark and we are all having spritzers. I have had too many spritzers. I feel that everyone is looking at everyone else’s naked feet. The twins who are not twins have baby toes that curl under, so you can see the plum-colored polish on only four toes. Craig has square toenails and calluses on his heels which come from playing tennis. Oliver’s long, tan feet are rubbing my legs. The dryness of his soles feels wonderful as he rubs his feet up and down the sticky sweat that has dried on my calves. Barbara has long toenails, painted bronze. Sven’s big toes are oblong and shapeless, the way balloons look when you first begin to blow them up. My toenails aren’t polished, because I can hardly bend over. I look at Oliver’s feet and mine and try to imagine a composite baby foot. As Sven pours, it is the first time I realize that my drink is gone and I have been crunching ice.